Movie notes: Selling ‘Adventureland’ short?

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star in ‘Adventureland,’ a comedy set at a amusement park in the ’80s that at least one critic thinks is being mismarketed.

Sorry to quote Roger Ebert one more time this week (I do read other critics), but something he said in one of his “Great Movies” essays comes to mind thanks to an email I just received about “Adventureland,” which opens Friday.

Movie studios, Ebert says, tend to market the movie they wish had been made instead of the one that actually was made.

That seems to be the theme of the day. “Sunshine Cleaning,” which I saw over the weekend and wrote about this morning, is certainly not the quirky comedy the ad campaign would have you believe. It’s good, but it’s not particularly funny or quirky.

Now I’ve received an email alert from a PR rep concerning an early review of “Adventureland” from Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune. The rep knows we run wire service reviews in Weekender and wanted to alert me to this one, mainly because it awards the film four stars. But I thought Phillips’ introduction was telling:

Hell with it: I’m going early with this review of Greg Mottola’s “Adventureland,” a swell little film being so dangerously mismarketed as a “Superbad”-brand raunch party, I fear the boomers who may appreciate it most will be the last ones to take a chance on it.

Here’s the review, which appears on Phillips’ “Talking Pictures” blog.